David Rocklin is a traditionally publish writer who s coming out with his third book. We talk about how he comes up with the premise and characters of his books, why he has chosen to run writing retreats, what it is like to be traditionally published and what keeps him going as a writer. You can find out more about David on his website. http://davidrocklinauthor.com/
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TRANSCRIPT STARTS HERE:
Kat
All right, everyone. Today I have with me David Rocklin. He is a writer and a teacher, and we’re going to get into all of the things, all of his books. Very exciting news because we have two things in common that we’ll get into as well. But hello, David. How are you doing?
David
Hi, Kat. Great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
Kat
I’m glad to have you here. Would you tell us a little bit about yourself in case somebody doesn’t know you?
David
Absolutely. I’m a novelist. I live in LA with my wife, my daughters, and a 160-pound Great Dane who, as we speak, is taking up my space on my bed as if that’s okay. But you can’t argue with him because he’s 160 pounds. He’s by far the biggest creature in this family. I am a published novelist. The bucket that I generally get put in is literary fiction with a historical bend. I also host and curate a reading series in LA that’s been going for about 10 years now called Roarshach. That takes place in ECHO Park, if anyone’s familiar with the LA area. I am just about to launch a writing craft book called The Write Formula. And along with that, there’ll be both virtual sessions and a physical retreat that I’ll be creating in a beautiful space in Idyllwild, California, which is in the mountains just outside Palm Springs, where right now, as I understand it, it’s about 6 feet of snow.
Kat
Hopefully that will melt by the time you get there.
David
There’s a lot of outdoor seating spaces, so you may just want to bring a nice thermal blanket. We will see.
Kat
We shall see, right? We don’t know. There are two things there. I have daughters, but my dog is female. There’s that. I’m very interested in writing retreats. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on because after COVID and all the things and huddling down, it’s nice to get out, right?
David
It’s funny. The reading series, we maintained it through COVID, but we did it virtually. And on the one hand, what I can say about it is it was lovely to meet readers and writers, both, who don’t live in LA, who wouldn’t ever be able to get to the series when it’s live. And that was great. But I really, really missed not only just the company of people, but the specific company of writers. Being in a room with people who intrinsically understand what the writing life is and just having that connection, having that vibe, having that sense of community. It wasn’t until we came back for our first live show when COVID started to… It’s still with us very much so. And at the beginning of each show, I always say, I am presuming you’re all vaccinated. If you’re not vaccinated, I’m presuming you have a mask. And if neither of those things are true, I’m presuming you’re leaving now. But that sense of community meant more to me than I think I realized. And that is something that also drove me to create what will be a physical retreat to give writers the chance to just be with others in a lovely setting and limited numbers so that nobody feels like they’re going to AWP and getting completely overwhelmed. But just to have that space, none of us get at home. Being a parent, you know your ability to carve out ‘you’ time to just simply dive into reading something, writing something, editing something, consulting on something without being pulled in multiple directions, without having distractions, that’s hard to come by. And so that was a big driver for me in deciding to create this.
Kat
Yeah, that’s amazing. I know most of us do write the novels in short bursts, possibly, probably shorter than what we wish that they were, whatever that ends up being.
David
At 4 a.m., because that’s the only time.
Kat
Yeah. So you hope no one else wakes up, especially the dog.
David
I know. I know. I’m actually 23, but look at what the writing life has done here, man.
Kat
It’s so stressful. Oh, my gosh.
David
I’m telling you.
Kat
So how did you start to write and decide that you wanted to write novels? Because it’s not an easy journey to get published.
David
I’ve noticed. So for me, the writing life, I think, writing has just always been a part of my life from as long as I could remember. I went through all the requisite phases of a young boy to a teenage boy should go through. There were times I wanted to be Bruce Lee. There were times I wanted to be a metal guitarist. There are times I wanted to be a champion MMA fighter. I went through all the phases. Let me just issue a spoiler alert. None of those came true. But the one common thread was I wrote about them. Early on, I began to realize one thing about myself, and that is that writing is how I understand and make sense of my world. My world doesn’t always make sense until I start thinking about it in a writerly way and start trying to find, what are the dynamics of this? What does it mean? What does it have to do with something that maybe happened to me last year? Are there connecting threads? Are there themes in my… That’s when I begin to understand things in perhaps a more depthful way. Otherwise, I’m just a blissful idiot just going along, making sure that the family is fed, making sure that there’s a roof and all that fun stuff. But I think I traced my formal start as a writer to my first encouragement received from someone who saw something in me, and then my first writing lesson. The encouragement came from a grade school English teacher named Mrs. Luxembourg, who told me that she felt that she was going to see my name in print one day. I thank her and acknowledge her in every book, I do. She’s still with us and I still keep in touch with her over Facebook. She is as feisty as ever. She reads my books when they come out, and that’s the loveliest thing in the world. Then my first writing lesson, honestly, which was that all… Oh, look who’s here to say hi. Come on in, buddy. My first writing lesson, which was all writing is contextual. When you read something, you bring your context to it. Whatever the writer thought they were communicating, it’s different now because of the way that you’ve received it and the life experience you’ve had that causes you to, hi, how are you? Thank you. And that was oddly, when I was little, I would sneak into R-rated films all the time. I should not have been there. Let me just say to anybody who’s listening, who is under the age of, say 18, R is for a reason, don’t get traumatized. But I would literally sneak downtown Chicago where I grew up, and I would just sit in these movie theaters and I would watch these R-rated triple features all day. It was my joy. And I think part of it was I was getting away with it. And so one day I snuck into a showing of the Bruce Lee film Enter the Dragon, which I was seeing for the very first time. If you haven’t seen it, don’t try to get in touch with me because I don’t want to know you as a human being. If you got to go see it, then let’s talk. But my mind was just blown apart by the impossibility of what he was doing physically. And he was just a very charismatic actor and martial artist. And so here I am, a very small child sitting in this movie, and there were two adult guys behind me who were entertained wildly both by the movie and by the fact that there’s a little kid whose head you couldn’t even see over the seat.
Kat
You were all by yourself?
David
Right in front, all by myself. I would sneak downtown. My parents were like, yeah, go, whatever, we don’t care. They didn’t even know where I was. And after the movie was over, they leaned forward and they said, what did you think? And I was like, that was insane. I’ve never seen anything like that. That was incredible. They’re like, yeah, it’s really too bad he’s dead, right? And I’m like, what? They’re like, yeah, no, he died some time back. They replay these films, but yeah, he’s dead. And then he get up and leave. And I’m just sitting there like, oh. And so because he could do this at the time, I sat through it again. I just stayed there. But that time, the second time, everything was different. Every time he did something, every time there was a turn in the story, every time there was a development, my mind said, He can’t do that anymore. He’s gone. That’s the last time he’s going to do that. What I realized, looking back on it, was I just saw two extremely different stories. It’s the same film, but my context had changed. And over time, I began to realize that’s writing. Writing is never your story. Writing is always what does your character think about your story? The context is what separates just the movement of scene A to scene B to this is a story that’s taking me along because I’m invested. It’s the context. So that was my first real writing lesson, I think.
Kat
That’s a really amazing way to say it. What does your character think about the story? Because we think about it being the character’s story, but that puts a bit of a twist on it that you’re writing it, you’re the pen, right? But really, what is it that the character thought of this story being told?
David
When I’m leading sessions and I’ll be doing this on the retreat as well, especially when we get into setting, this becomes really important. I talk about this like ad nauseam because I’m pretty passionate about it. We’ve all read stories where you’re like, well, I think it took place in a small town. I mean, whatever, small town USA, or it was a little Dutch village or something. I can’t remember the name, but it didn’t really matter. Then there are stories where the setting is vital. The setting is a character. What’s Harry Potter without Hogwarts? There’s a reason. What’s Gone with the Wind without Tara? Even though Gone with them to me is racist and I just can’t watch it. But the setting is famous and there’s a reason for that because the setting is viewed through the eyes of a proud woman who shortly comes to such bad ends that she can no longer afford it. And you better believe Tara is different for her when that happens versus the beginning because it’s not the setting, it’s what the character thinks about the setting. So we go deep into this.
Kat
That’s so true. And that really makes the reader then be invested in it, doesn’t it? Where, like you said, Harry Potter is not Harry Potter without Hogwarts. Send him to an American high school and it changes the story. It’s a completely different premise. Everything’s going to change.
David
Yeah. Let’s put Harry Potter in the Amish country. You know what? Let’s not. Yeah.
Kat
No, my brain is going crazy at the moment.
David
There may be some fan fiction opportunities. Yeah, go with it.
Kat
You can see what happens.
David
Harry Potter and the Butterchurn of Doom. It just writes itself.
Kat
But it’s true. I can’t think of where the setting… I mean, we’ve all read those books where the setting doesn’t really play a part. And I think it does take away from it, from the story itself. But then there’s also when people get the setting wrong. And I think you can really see that in books where they’ll go on and on and on about something, and maybe it’s cool, but it doesn’t connect with the book. So what would you think that a writer is doing there? Is it just like putting in a description because they have to or something?
David
Yeah. There are they’re doing basically Wikipedia research and they’re just looking for it at a map and they’re saying, okay, so let’s see, my character needs to sail from Kiel, Germany to let’s put him in Spain. And so he sailed for a month. And then if you really do a deep dive, you find out, yeah, under a boat with a nuclear powered motor, you couldn’t make it that fast. Inevitably, for all writers out there, you What?
Kat
He wants to be part of the project.
David
He does want it. He’s like, Did you mention how much I weigh? I did. All writers out there, someone’s going to catch you. Somebody lives there. Somebody knows that route. I always think about it in terms of this old American film that everybody who went to my college had to see. It was called Breaking Away. It’s actually a wonderful film. I think it’s from the 70s or something. Basically, it’s set on the campus of Indiana University. And it deals with what’s called the Little 500, which is a tradition on that campus of a bicycle race. And it’s held every year and it’s like a big giant deal on the campus. And so this film, that was the backdrop of the story. It’s actually a beautiful film about friendship and growing up and figuring out who you are. But there’s a scene in the film that when you’re on campus, it was literally like Rocky horror. You’d go to the theater and when the scene came up, everybody would just start throwing things at the screen because the writers basically had the character leave his house, which is on a particular street, and he turns right on his bicycle and now he’s on a different street. Everybody who went to school knows that that’s about a 10-mile difference, and that right turn does not put you on that street at all. And everybody started yelling. And it’s funny, but the problem is when you do that in your novel, when you create a setting or create a scene, but it’s not grounded in the reality that you’ve established, and that’s different than the reality that exists. If you want to create an alternative universe in New York, as long as you’ve established it and established the rules of it, then you get to do what you want. If you want to basically say that the Empire State Building is actually horizontal, that’s fine. If it’s endemic to your story and you’ve created those rules, cool. But if you haven’t, if you’ve just simply shortcut it and it’s spotted, it’s not just like, oops, you got me. I didn’t do enough research. I’m out of the story because all I’m thinking about is I may not be conscious of this thought, but as a reader, all I’m thinking about is, Well, what else about your story can I not trust? Am I in safe hands because you haven’t brought your best to this, so should I be reading? It really has more of a ripple effect than I think writers sometimes think about. It’s like, get those details right or make them up, but make that making up an intrinsic part of your story. As long as you’re following your rules, whatever they are, we’re going to go to whatever alternate universe you want to take us.
Kat
Yes. I think you’re very right about that. It’s that disconnect that you suddenly feel and you’re no longer invested in it. And then you’ve lost trust with your readers and the chances of them picking up another book might not be very low at that point.
David
And especially if you’re talking about nontraditional publishing, self publishing. This is just the fact of the state of play with readership. The majority of readers are going to gravitate towards names they know. I mean, there’s a reason where if you look at the New York Times best seller list, I think is like eight tenths of it. I’m like, who is this person and how are they dominating all of this? But obviously there’s a strong sense of trust. There’s a strong sense of… And for some writers who are more pure, and we were talking about this, that demarcation between genre fiction and literary fiction, and I’m literary fiction, I’m above this. It’s like, so that means you’re starving is what you’re saying? All these demarcation points, there’s a sense of this writing is more worthy than that writing. All writing is taking root in the reader. The reader is different for having read it. The reader values the experience of those words. The reader is carrying those words forward. When the reader remembers a time in their life, it may be tied to a song, it may be tied to your book. And you don’t know that, but you don’t know how much your writing matters to someone.
David
But since readers tend to gravitate towards writers they already know, when a reader says, you know what? I’m not familiar with this Kat Caldwell, but I really like the cover, or I love the description on the back jacket. I’m going to give this one a go. I don’t want to pile pressure on people, but as a writer, it’s not just, well, I hope I convince you to give me another try. I hope you like this story. It is also, I hope you’ll give a try to other writers you don’t know. We have a bond with each other as writers. We’ve taken the unspoken pledge that drivers take when they hit the road. I promise to keep you other people safe. I’m not going to go crazy. I’m not going to drink. I’m not going to be stupid. As writers, we’ve also taken a little bit of an unspoken oath, right? I’m going to give this my best. I’m going to put forth the effort. I’m going to care about this book. I’m going to bleed over this book. Because if I don’t, then there may be writers who can transcend the hubbub and get their book known by an inordinate number of people. But for the most of us, it’s word of mouth. It’s whatever marketing our publisher puts into it. But it’s also, Kat turning to her family and saying, I read this book by this guy called the Night Language. You should really read it. That’s how we go. That’s how all of us go. So bring your best, man. Bring your best or find something else to do.
Kat
I’ve been talking about this for probably a year now with anyone listening to the podcast. They might be tired of me, but I know that writers, usually we have some talent or some draw to it. But at the same time, there’s a lot to learn about this. And I think that ties into this trust that we have between writers and between writers and readers. And they’re trusting us that we’re putting forth our best. And I try to encourage everyone to, of course, the book that you write in the moment should be the best that you can do at that moment. We can’t know everything. And if we waited until we knew everything, we’d never write a book. But at least put forth your best and understand the craft. I see things on Twitter where people are saying, Well, to hell with grammar rules or structure rules. And my thought is always, that’s fine if you understand what those rules are before you break them. But otherwise, it’s just this ignorant arrogance of like, I can break rules. I don’t even know how to say what they are. So that’s not breaking rules. That’s not knowing what you’re doing.
David
It’s funny. I think about this in two different ways. The first way is like in martial arts, there’s this concept, and I came up doing combat sports. That was a formative event for me, sitting and watching it through the dragon in so many ways. Oh, my god. But one of the concepts that I learned was learn the rule, master the rule, then break the rule.
Kat
Yeah, I think that applies across the board.
David
You don’t get to break the rule before you learn it. And the other concept is, and this is something all of us, all writers, we all do this, we all relate to this. It’s when you write that first draft and your impulse is, oh, my god. That came from my heart. It’s pure. It’s raw. It’s ready. I’m sending it out. We all do this, right? Hopefully, most of us either have an internal editor or a friend who says, you’re adorable. It’s a first draft. Shut up. Now the work begins. I fully, fully understand that impulse of, oh, my god. It’s raw. It’s ready. I’m so transgressive. I’ve crossed all the boundaries. My sentences don’t even make sense. They don’t even begin. It’s like, that’s lovely. That’s cool. But you may think you’re communicating something, but what are the chances that communication is going to be received the way that you thought? If it mattered so much to you to tell this story, whatever the story is, it might be a poem of two or three lines, or it may be a 600-page novel in parts, whatever it may be. If it mattered so much to you that an writer, as we understand this, right? You bleed over those pages. You think about them when you’re not writing them. You come back to them over and over and over again before you ever set pen to paper or finger to pad. If it mattered that much to you to do it, it probably matters to you in terms of how it’s understood. We all have put something out, given it to a beta reader, and they’re like, it’s the conundrum of the writing workshop or when you’re dealing with an editor or something where they hand it back to you and you get three different pieces of criticism on the same issue and they’re all different and you’re like, who do I listen to? What do I do? It’s like, No, that’s data. What it’s telling you is whatever you thought you were communicating, it’s not coming across the way you thought. Now you have a decision to make. But that decision should never be, I’m one and done. I threw it down on paper, it’s ready. Unless where you’re taking it is to your drawer, which is awesome. Make it pure. Look back on it when you’re 90 and go, look at me, I was adorable at 17, look at the thoughts I had running in my head. I found a journal of mine, like some months back, really old one. And it was basically the equivalent of I’m a lone wolf, nobody understands me, nobody’s ever felt like this before. Now you look at it and go, aww. But at the time, that felt very pure to me. Would I put it out? No. No. It’s terrible. I learned from it. I grew from it. But that’s not publishable. And that’s the thing. As writers, we all know we have no choice but to write, it’s in us. We can’t not write. The thought of not writing is unthinkable. That’s the need. But to publish, to read it out loud, to give it to someone, that’s not the same thing. That’s a decision. So if you make that decision, respect. Respect the world you’re stepping into. Make it the best you can.
Kat
Yeah. And that’s the only way that you can be proud of it, right? I’ve worked with authors. I work mostly with indie authors. But there is an issue in which you always have the nagging feeling if you didn’t put your best. And then they have a hard time marketing it because. They have that like, oh, I don’t really want anyone to see it. Well, then take it off and go fix it.
David
That imposter syndrome is real. We all feel it. I’m fortunate enough to have been published twice. I feel it.
Kat
It’s like with every book, right?
David
Yeah, I feel it at the beginning of every book. It always comes in the form of the question, am I good enough to tell this story? Am I up to this task? Am I the right one to tell this story? Do I have what it takes to do it? And then when you make that next step of sending it out, sending it to an agent, sending it to publishers, sending it to editors and waiting for their reply, you sit there with the quiet. The quiet, to me, is harder than the rejection. The rejection is at least an answer. The quiet is you’re sitting there going, What are they thinking? Have they even read it? You just start reading in the most negative stuff. Part of that is, well, this isn’t something I’m good enough to do. We all have that. Make friends with that voice., It’s not going away. It’s always going to be there. Use it as fuel.
Kat
Right. To keep going, keep learning. You have two books that are, like you said, typically more literary fiction with a historical bend. You have really interesting stories. One is called… Your first was the Illuminist, right? The Illuminist, right? The Luminist.
David
The Luminist, yeah.
Kat
The Luminist, I have to pronounce that right. And the second…
David
It’s a hard one. Yeah, it’s a hard one.
Kat
It’s a night language. How is your writing process? How do you come up with these stories? They’re very different if you want to give us a little blurb on each one. And then what is your process in research and writing and maybe if you’re plotting or all that stuff?
David
Yeah. What’s funny about how do I come up with them is I almost feel like I don’t. It almost feels like they find me among others and they say, you’re the home I’m supposed to be at. And it’s just up to me to recognize that they found me for a particular reason. For me, all my books, all three of them have started with… It first starts with an image. It may either be an image I’m seeing, like the Luminist started with an image that I saw at the Getty Museum in LA. And then the image is essentially married at some point to a little fact, a little kernel, a little nugget that’s of no interest to anyone but me. And somehow that image and that little fact collide and they start throwing off sparks and a fire starts and now I can’t look away from it. And that’s happened all three times. So the Luminist actually arose from a photographic exhibition at the Getty in LA of early Victorian era photography back when it was just beginning and nobody really knew what they were doing. They had an exhibit of a woman named Julia Margaret Cameron, who lived during the Victorian era. She lived for a time in Ceylon, which is now Sri Lanka. She was married to a director of the East India Trading Company. The images I thought were just gorgeous. I found her to be really transgressive and cool because she essentially stepped through all the boundaries that were put up for women at the time. She insisted on this as her artistic expression that was unheard of. I’m like, what a bad ass. I would love to know a little bit more about her, but I wasn’t really thinking about it as a book. I had my obligatory drafts of terrible books in my drawer and had begun them. The one thing I can say about myself is I’ve never not completed it, but I have my terrible novels that will never see the light of day because I like people and I don’t want to do that to them. But I hadn’t really found my voice, I think. Because I became interested in her, I read a biography of her. And out of all the pages of the biography, there was one sentence that was it. And the one sentence was, she lost a child at birth. And in that moment, that fact collided with these early images of her first attempts of photography. And what arose from that was the idea of this woman holding her baby who she’d lost at birth and realizing, in five years, I may not remember what you look like because memory is frail and memory is faulty and I can’t hold on to you. And then comes this art and science that promises the possibility of holding a moment still forever. And a woman who basically says, I will never lose a moment that matters to me again if I can help it. And that became the story of the Luminist, this early age photographic pioneer and a young tameel boy who becomes her apprentice in this burgeoning art. And then the second novel, The Night Language, arose from one of the images that she took in life, which I got to see as part of the Getty archives when I was doing research for the Luminist. And it was of this young black boy who was probably about 10-years-old. This was from the mid to late 1800s. It was one of the images she had taken. He was dressed in what a colonialist would consider African garb. It looked, to our eyes, looked stereotypical. It looked degrading. It was kind ofhorrifying. But his face, he looked defiant, lost, lonely, pissed. And I’m like, who is this kid? I need to know who this kid is. But I put it aside because I had to finish the Luminist. Then that happened, like a book tour and all that fun stuff. When it was time to think about what I was going to write next, I came back to that photo. I’m like, I need to know who this child is. I did research and out of the research, I learned who he was. He was the son of the Abyssinian Emperor, Abyssinia now being Ethiopia, and that he was taken forcibly by England after an invasion of Abyssinia and brought to be a ward of Queen Victoria’s Court. And in life, and this was the little fact that collided with the image, in life, he died very young. And so the collision for me there was, I need to write him a life that he didn’t get. I need to. I just need to. And so in the beginning of that book, the first few drafts, I was hewing rather close to what his real life was, which was there was a British officer who became like a father figure to him. But that dropped away because in one sequence in the third draft when he was aboard the ship, bringing him back from his home where he doesn’t know anybody, doesn’t speak the language, he’s surrounded by the people who essentially obliterated his country. He’s very much alone. He sees across the galley one day, another black young man who didn’t have a role in that draft, didn’t have a name. He just saw him. In that moment, he’s like, There’s at least one other like me here. And then in subsequent drafts, he acquired a name. And he came up to the deck and they stood next to each other on the rail. And they were just looking out the rail and they were both too afraid to say anything. And this young man actually basically was like the apprentice to a surgeon aboard the ship. And they were just standing there and they were looking at their hands next to each other and how they were like the same. This gradually evolved into they became the love of each other’s life. I didn’t see that coming. That was not the plan, but I let the characters find their way that is what ultimately became the Night Language, which was this love story that takes place in Queen Victoria’s Court, where the forces of politics and society conspire to keep them apart and essentially punish them for who they are. And so it became the story of what would you do for the love of your life if you had to? How far would you go? And so that’s the second book.
Kat
It seems like, and this might be just the way that you said it now, the Luminist, you almost had the premise right away, how she was going to hold on to that moment. But it sounds like the Night Language, it really took some digging into just writing that character to find it.
David
Yeah, I think that’s really insightful. I think that’s exactly right. I had to find my way. And as part of that, I think that I had to put to practice what I had learned, which was trust the characters when they start talking back to you, when they start telling you, I know what you thought I was going to do. I’m aware of your map, your outline, whatever you do. Your plan. I scoff at your plan. I’m aware of what you thought I was going to do towards the end of the book, but I’m not that person. That’s not who I’ve come to be. And you’ve come to know me. You know I’m not that person. That’s not the decision I would make. And so I had to put trust in that. Let them go where they’re going to go. Let’s see what happens. The worst that happens is I rethink it. But let me see where you guys are headed to. And that’s where it was headed to. And frankly, that’s what got it published.
Kat
I think that’s really interesting because there are times and there are stories I find, personally, where I could have the whole idea, and then it turns out that that’s just a very small seed. The rest of the finished book has nothing to do with it. I marvel at people that stick to their plans. I wonder always how did they spend five years thinking about it? I don’t know.
David
I marvel at them, but at the same time… It’s funny because… And this is actually a part of the Write Formula, the writing craft book. This is a very prominent part of what I try to impart to people. And in the retreats, we’ll be talking a lot about this. But imagine for a moment you and I have just met, which is not hard to imagine because we’ve just met. Because we just did. But imagine for a moment that we’re sitting there and I say, okay, Kat, so here’s how this is going to go. I’m going to write out an outline of our friendship each day for the next year so that when you check the outline in June, you can see that we are going for coffee at 10:30. I’ll be getting your coffee for you. It will have cream in it and you’re going to be drinking it and then you’re going to hurl it at the wall. That’s what you’re going to do, June at 10:30 a.m., count on it because you are not allowed to change it. You’re locked in and that’s going to happen every day. There’s going to be some decision I’ve made for you and you’re going to be like, you don’t know me. You don’t know whether I even like coffee. You don’t know whether I’m going to be in the same city as you. You don’t even know if we’re going to still be friends. You don’t know anything. That’s how I feel about writing an outline out and then sticking to it, no matter what happens in the actual writing. Let them breathe because they’re going to start making decisions. Who wants that friendship? Nobody wants that friendship. What you want is, let’s get to know each other. Let’s determine who we are in our various situations. Now, let’s talk about what we’re going to do in an informed way. That to me is where the writing process, the whole process of getting from A to B to C to D, that’s where it is. It’s not necessarily in that first plan. It’s great to have it because it gives you a little bit of a guide. But don’t be afraid to deviate from it. That’s where all the good stuff is.
Kat
So let’s talk about your craft book. It’s called The Write Formula, so W-R-I-T-E. How did the idea come about?
David
I think it came about in combination of having completed and being published twice, which is a lovely thing that I feel very fortunate about. And then particularly the reading series of watching writers come in, come out, go through the process of sharing their work in a public way, how it’s received, and hearing everything from, I want to expand this short piece into something longer, but I don’t know how, to, honestly, I didn’t realize that that’s how my piece was going to go over until I started getting the feedback from the audience and I go, oh, that’s what they’re hearing. I didn’t really get that right away. And all that coming together. And then writers just asking me questions because they knew I was published or that I was represented and stuff. And when I would answer those questions as best I could, just in terms of, well, here’s how I do it. Everybody’s got their own way, but this is what I find helpful. And then hearing, oh, it was really helpful. I began to realize, maybe there’s something of value that I can give back to writers. Not to say, this is the way. It’s more like, This is what I do. Let’s see if it works for you. That’s really the spirit of it is not to say, I have cornered the market on writing techniques. It’s more like, this is what has really helped me, and it gets me through those writing phases that we all go through, everything from I’m just not sure where to take this idea, or how much research should I do? I don’t really know where to drop a flashback in. How do I figure that out? How do I deal with criticism? How do I deal with rejection? I’ve been through all of those and like, Well, here’s what’s helped me. I hope it helps you, too.
Kat
I tell people all the time, anyone I’m working with and myself, there are so many ways to do things. This is an art form, right? But again, we have to look at the different ways that people do things and learn from them, I think, in order to find our own way. It will probably be a marriage between what you say in the Write Formula to what a writer is doing now to maybe what they find outside. Because in the end, it’s art and it’s just our brains and we have to get it. But it can be really helpful to see what other people have done.
David
Yeah. It’s an oft, repeated axiom of writing that if you want to be a writer, read widely, read outside your area, read everything. I’ve learned from so many writers of so many different types of writing. I had a writer friend who wrote on a contract basis for Harlequin. Just the techniques that she brought to the notion of keeping that pace, keeping the plot moving, incorporating certain elements. It was interesting the way that they did it because it was like, by page, such and such, you need to have this. You have this. It was very interesting. There’s got to be sex. I learned from everybody, and the cliches of writing is that genre fiction is usually written poorly, but it moves like lightning. The plotting and the pace is great. Literary fiction, it’s written beautifully, but it just sits there. It doesn’t go anywhere. It’s just somebody walking around New York for five days thinking about their life, and it’s boring as shit. And it’s like, those are the cliches and the truth should always be marry all of them. Marry them together. Put them together. And so it’s just a fascinating amalgamation to me that hopefully writers are reading and they’re picking up. And in fact, there’s just an approach that I’ve taken when I read that taught me how to plot because I wasn’t MFA and I didn’t have access to a writer’s workshop. So I really was trying to figure out how to plot a story just from my own sense of storytelling and reading other writers and asking myself, what do I know about the story and what are they doing to share that information with me taught me in almost like a blueprint way, this is how they approach it. Once you read like six or seven books, you begin to realize you have permission. There are so many different ways to structure a plot. There are so many different ways to drop in little things. There’s not a one formula that fits all that must be adhered to. You have freedom, and that’s a very freeing idea. It’s like, I can really approach this. One question I always ask writers to ask themselves when they feel stuck is, what am I afraid of right now? What am I afraid of doing that’s causing me to hesitate? Am I afraid that if I do such and such, it’s not publishable? Am I afraid that if I say such and such, it’s offensive? What am I afraid of? And then do that thing. And then do it.
Kat
Yes. So are you going to be using the structure of this book of the Write Formula at the retreat? Are you going to be asking them these questions? Is it going to be an interactive retreat? Is it going to be?
David
Oh, extremely. Yeah. There’s a few things I think I’ve come to believe about what makes a good retreat. Number one is make sure there’s lots of really delicious food and good stuff to drink, 100 %. And number two, make sure that there is the thing that we don’t get, which is time. Time and space to just do the work, whether that day the work is writing or whether that day the work is staring out into a beautiful vista, which this property happens to have, and it’s really lovely. The way I think the retreats are going to go, the physical retreats is that get together. I’m, first of all, not going to have people stay at the spot because my feeling very strongly is that at a certain point, you just want your own space. You don’t want to live, breathe and breathe with people for two or three days straight and then go beddy bye with them and then wake up with them. You want your own little space, so we’ll make sure that gets taken care of. But we’ll get together in the morning, have some food, get into a writing session, something guided with lots of really fun interactive exercises, talking a little bit about what we’re trying to accomplish and what we’re going to hopefully produce that day. And then space. I will be around. Everybody who wants to consult with me can run things by, bounce ideas around, but it’ll be writing space. And we come back together later in the afternoon with more food there and in between, maybe do something fun like take a little hike or do a little yoga session or just something a little physical, and then call it a day. So it’ll be like content, it’ll be guidance and interactive talks between each other and between us. And then it’ll be just that time and space where there’s no demands on you. There’s no distractions. Nobody needs anything from you. This is your time. This is your getaway. I hope to make that as cozy and as enriching as possible.
Kat
That sounds lovely. That’s very lovely.
David
You’re welcome to come. It’s a short hop from DC.
Kat
This is true. So when is it going to be? And do you plan on… You said you’re going to do one online as well?
David
Yeah, I’m going to probably do some virtual sessions to coincide with when the book is available. And I think the first writing retreat will probably be like the fall of this year.
Kat
Okay, that’s wonderful. I do think that sometimes we get really stuck in this day-to-day and we have this book to write and all the demands. And I found for myself, and I’ve been talking about it for a while, is the time to think about the book. Sometimes you have maybe an hour and you feel like you should go write the words. Really, what I found with myself is half the time, almost literally 50% of the time, I need to go take a walk and think about the words. Of course, then you get a little bit frustrated because then you don’t have any time left to put the words on the paper.
David
But that’s the thing. Absolutely, it is. Whenever writers say, Oh, my god, I feel really guilty. I didn’t do any writing today. I’m like, were you thinking about it? Were you thinking about a character? Were you interrogating yourself a little bit about what am I trying to say in that particular section? You were writing. You were 100% writing, you may have been doing better writing than when you were writing. It’s okay. It’s 100% okay. That guilt thing, which I think sometimes can be a little bit fueled by social media or some of these NaNoWriMo contests where it’s like, you need to put down 5,000 words. No, you do not. You need to write when you can, when you feel it. You need time and space and freedom to think about what you’re writing and really be able to focus on it. But when you start putting hard deadlines and minimum word count on yourself, I get it. Writers write, that’s what you, quote unquote, should be doing. But when you start weaving guilt and shame and that sense of compares despair when you look at other writers and go, oh, my god, they’re way more productive than me. Do you know what you’re doing? You are absolutely stopping up your sync. You are just stopping the flow of writing. You be you. If you got this far, it’s because you’re relentless. But relentless doesn’t mean I write for 12 hours a day until my hand falls off my wrist. It means writing is a part of your life. It’s a permanent part of your life, and it’s always there with you. You’re a writer. You’re a writer. Don’t punish yourself.
Kat
Yes, exactly. I love that. Will you tell us a little bit about the third book, or is that still, the third novel, or is that still under wraps?
David
It’s a little under wraps. It’s on submission right now. It is typical of me, odd. It, once again, started with a notion and then a little fact. That’s really cool. It really came out. I was just playing with some research on near death experiences just because they’re just super interesting to me.
Kat
Because you’re a writer?
David
Because I’m a writer. Yeah, exactly. It’s like, oh, this is so cool. There was a really cool story, I think, that took place in the 90s or something of this woman who essentially just keeled over on the sidewalk. She had a sudden brain aneurysm of some kind, and they needed immediate emergency surgery. She had a near death experience where she saw herself on the table and described to the doctors afterwards everything they did. It was accurate. All her senses had been blocked. They put noise canceling headphones on her because they needed a baseline of her brain activity and they didn’t want any extra stimuli getting in. So not only was she fully anesthetized, but they used surgical glue to shut her eyes so her brain wasn’t storing any images, but she still saw all of this. It’s unexplained. And I was like, this is the coolest story ever. My mind was running with it. And in the article, there was this footnote. And of course, I’m like, well, if you put a footnote, I have to read it. You went to that trouble. And so I found the footnote and it was because it dealt with the moment where she was hooked up to the EEG, the electroencephalogram, where they were measuring her brain activity. And the footnote said the EEG is largely credited to this German psychiatrist from the turn of the 20th century who himself had a near death experience that led to its development. I’m like, well, I need to follow this. Down the rabbit hole, I need to go. That’s what led to the new book. It was this gentleman’s experience where proving that it happened to him became his white whale. He chased it all his life. He never quite proved it. But he went from the turn of the 20th century straight into the rise of the Nazi party. And I’m like, This story is about the two things that are so powerful that they can be heard across great distance by somebody who’s not there. Love and death. This is a story. And so that’s really where this novel developed. It’s called The Electric Love Song of Fleyshaw Burgar. And I hope it finds a home soon.
Kat
That’s awesome. I think it goes back to what you said before, it’s read all the time. Read, read, read, because you honestly never know where it’s going to come from.
David
You never know where it’s coming from. It comes from the craziest places. It comes unexpectedly. Remember those fly strips that they sell in stores where the fly just gets stuck to it? They’re pretty gross. But I have a fly strip rule for writing because we get bombarded with ideas all the time. We’re always like, That’d be cool. And then it’s gone. Don’t worry about those. But if you find yourself 24, 48 hours later, it’s still with you, pay attention to it. It’s stuck to you for a reason, and it’s demanding your attention. So the ones that just come and go really quickly, they weren’t supposed to stay. Don’t worry about them.
Kat
Right. That’s amazing. I love that. So where can people find you if they want to get to the writing retreat, if they want to buy the Write Formula, if they want to see this new book coming out and your other ones?
David
Yeah, I would love to hear from everybody. The best places to reach me are on Instagram and Facebook. And on both of those sites, I can be reached either at my name, David Rocklin, on Instagram it’s @the.write.formula. So I respond to all the DMs and all the comments. Reach out to me. I’d love to hear from you if you think that I might be able to help you with what you’re working on. I’d love to hear from you just if you want to just say, here’s what I’m working on. Just wanted to share it with another writer. I love that. And I will get back to you because I know what it’s like to wait in quiet. I’m not going to do that to anybody. I just will not do it.
Kat
That’s amazing. So we will have the links in the show notes below, obviously. If anyone is looking for a retreat, this retreat sounds amazing. Definitely follow David so that you can find out when the new book, The Electric Love Song of Fleshell… Fleshell? I’m not very good at it. That’s a great title. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
David
I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. This was fun. Hey, you’re still listening.